Page 100 of In the Dark of the Past

It buzzed.

Once. Twice. A third time.

River’s eyes moved to it. She didn’t say anything.

I turned it over.

Unknown number. Three messages, arriving in sequence, thirty seconds apart.

The first:

TICK TOCK.

The second was a photograph.

My department. The squad room. Dark, lit only by the blue glow of a monitor left on. A figure standing in the middle of the room, not moving, not looking at the camera, just standing there. The clock on the wall behind them reflected in a dark window.

2:47 a.m.

Last night.

While River and I were asleep.

The third message:

WE’RE ALREADY INSIDE.

The kitchen was very quiet.

I was aware of River standing beside me, her shoulder almost touching mine, looking at the same screen. I was aware of the coffee getting cold in my mug and the pine stand outside and the way the stillness had been the last thirty minutes of our morning. All of it present. All of it already changed.

“That’s the station,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“They were inside at 2:47.”

“Yeah.”

“They want us to know they were inside.” Her voice was level, clinical. “They’re not just gathering information. They’re demonstrating access. They want us to feel it.”

I was already reaching for my jacket. “Call Atlas. Tell him I need eyes on the evidence room immediately.”

She was already dialing.

I finished my coffee in two swallows and thought about what it meant that they’d sent the photo at 7:14 in the morning, not 2:47 when the access happened. Hours later. After we’d woken up. After the morning had done what mornings do.

They’d waited. They wanted us to have the quiet morning first. They wanted us to know they could take it any time they chose.

Atlas met us at the station’s back entrance, his expression already set in the flat, competent grimness of a man who had been awake for some time and had found things he wished he hadn’t.

“Front door wasn’t forced,” he said as we came in. “No broken locks. No alarm trigger. They either have a key or a bypass.”

“Jordyn,” River said.

“Her badge hasn’t pinged since yesterday afternoon,” Atlas said. “But someone used her login credentials at 11:52 p.m. And the camera feeds”—he stopped, and his jaw tightened—”someone looped the footage. At least two hours of it.”

I kept moving. Down the hall toward evidence. “The Eleanor file?”